Explainer: What are pro-Palestinian protesters at UW-Madison asking for?

Demands include divestment, investment disclosure and elimination of some exchange programs

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UW-Madison leaders and pro-Palestinian protesters have continued to meet throughout the weekend to negotiate what it would take for demonstrators to end their nearly weeklong encampment on UW-Madison’s Library Mall. 

It’s unclear when a final resolution will come, if at all. UW-Madison leaders said in a Friday afternoon statement that they hope for “a solution before the beginning of finals on Sunday.” 

Dahlia Saba, a member of Students for Justice in Palestine-Madison told reporters Saturday afternoon that the time needed for a resolution would depend on “how willing the administration is to make commitments towards actually meeting” protesters’ demands.

Another organizer, who prefers to be identified only as the camp’s media liaison, said that UW-Madison administrators agreed to withhold police intervention as long as negotiations are ongoing. On Wednesday, police officers tore down a majority of tents that protesters put up on Monday and arrested 34 protesters. Protesters quickly reestablished the encampment. 

Among the top demands of SJP-Madison is that UW-Madison and UW System divest from all Israeli institutions and Israel-aligned companies. This is a complicated ask. Financial divestment efforts are complicated, with investments often bundled in mutual funds. The process also involves navigating numerous donor restrictions and red tape. 

Most public and private universities maintain multimillion- or billion-dollar endowments, largely sourced from donors, that accrue annual income and provide funds as needed. A majority are managed by outside entities like the nonprofit private corporation UW Foundation and its governing board of donors and alums, that controls UW-Madison’s nearly $4 billion dollar endowment. 

Endowments have become increasingly important as the UW System and public universities across the country navigate cuts in state funding. UW-Madison is increasingly reliant on private funding — 33% of the school’s 2023 budget was derived from gifts, compared to an average 4.9% for other UW System campuses. 

Because the UW Foundation is a private corporation it is not subject to the state open records law that governs public entities like the UW System, and is not required to disclose its investment details. That status, however, is being challenged in a 2024 lawsuit filed by journalist Daniel Libit, who was denied access by the UW Foundation to an athletic department consulting agreement. 

Tod Pritchard, spokesperson for UW Foundation, tells Isthmus the Wisconsin Foundation and Alumni Association (WFAA) provides broad investment information in an annual financial report but doesn’t disclose details of investment holdings. When asked if there are specific policies or procedures that would prevent them sharing details of individual holdings, Pritchard says “we don’t have any further comment at this time.”

The WFAA held nearly $4.9 billion in net assets in June 2023, according to an annual financial report. Payments for UW-Madison totaled $339 million in fiscal year 2023. 

The UW System has $487 million invested in public markets through six exchange-traded funds managed by BlackRock, an investment manager that’s drawn criticism from pro-Palestine activists for having holdings in such military contractors as Raytheon and Boeing. The Board of Regents’ Business and Finance Committee is the “ultimate fiduciary and trustee” of those investable funds, according to a UW System webpage.

UW System invests $249 million in the MSCI ACWI ETF fund and $13.7 million in the Developed Real Estate Index Fund B; 0.25% and 0.33% of those funds, respectively, are connected to Israeli investments. A protest organizer told UW-Madison student newspaper The Daily Cardinal the ACWI fund is the focus of their divestment efforts.

Though most universities have not negotiated agreements with protesters, some, including the University of California-Riverside, Brown University, Northwestern University and the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, have struck deals to end their encampments in exchange for divestment votes, disciplinary leniency or other concessions. Student protesters at Brown will make arguments to five members of the university’s corporation for an advisory committee analysis and a corporate board vote on divestment by October 2024.

Some experts have said divestment efforts are largely symbolic and would be of minor impact to businesses and Israel. Yet any concession to protesters — as has happened at Brown, Northwestern and the University of Minnesota — could inflame tensions with UW-Madison’s donors and threaten the school’s strong philanthropic portfolio.

Abbie Klein, a doctoral student at UW-Madison and SJP-Madison member, tells Isthmus that BlackRock has “helped facilitate the genocide” of Palestinians by funding weapons manufacturers and that students deserve to know where their tuition dollars go to. Additionally, she says the UW Foundation should disclose its investments. 

“We don't know where all of it is going because they haven't disclosed it,” Klein says.

“Cutting ties with Israeli institutions,” another SJP-Madison demand, would impact some long-standing programs at UW-Madison. The Binational Agricultural Research and Development Fund, for example, is a federally run agriculture research funding program jointly operated by the U.S. and Israeli governments since 1979. The program has funded $310 million in research nationally since 1979 — from 1979 to 2022, UW-Madison received $3.5 million that funded 32 projects.

In removing the research and study abroad programs, Klein says SJP-Madison wants to ensure students aren’t “unintentionally or even intentionally complicit in genocide” by doing labor or research for Israeli institutions. 

One of the programs that SJP-Madison wants to end at UW-Madison is the George L. Mosse Graduate Exchange Fellowship, which allows fellows from Hebrew University in Jerusalem and UW-Madison to spend a year researching at the respective partner university. The program is named after George Mosse, who fled Nazi Germany with his family in 1933 and later, as a UW professor, became an international expert on European fascism and Nazi Germany. Mosse died in 1999. The exchange fellowship is designed to foster an international intellectual community and research. 

Protesters are also asking for the complete removal of police officers on campus. So far no protest nationally has accomplished this goal, which gained traction during the Black Lives Matter protests after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020. The University of Minnesota distanced itself from the Minneapolis Police Department for campus services in 2020, according to Inside Higher Ed, but renewed its partnership in 2022. Students at the University of California System pushed for campus police abolition in 2020.

At UW-Madison, according to a piece in Tone Madison by historian Kacie Lucchini Butcher, “cops off campus” signs and movements were common throughout the 1960s, '70s, '80s and '90s. In 2020, the school’s student government body, Associated Students of Madison (ASM), passed a vote of no confidence in the UW-Madison Police Department, citing disapproval of police presence at protests and “unwillingness” to engage in reform efforts requested by ASM.

Under Wis. Stat 36.11 (2), the UW Board of Regents “may employ police for the institutions and chiefs to head such police” under supervision of a chancellor or a chancellor's designee. 

But abolishing police on campus would be a legal nonstarter, according to UW System spokesperson Mark Pitsch, who tells Isthmus that federal and state laws, in addition to Board of Regents policy, “effectively require the Universities of Wisconsin to provide a safe environment on campus, including the enforcement of civil and criminal violations on campuses.” 

Klein criticized UW-Madison’s use of police force on May 1 when it forcibly removed tents from the Library Mall and clashed with protesters, charging that the university is “willing to brutalize its students in the name of property.”

“I have never felt more safe than in this environment, this encampment, until the police were here,” Klein said.

SJP-Madison is also asking UW-Madison to cease further expansion and large-scale acquisitions of land. Klein acknowledged that UW-Madison’s land is Ho-Chunk land and that “most of us on this land today are colonizers.” As such, she says addressing existing housing issues should be a top priority for UW-Madison, rather than “buying up land for other expansions or buildings.”

“There are a lot of unhoused individuals in Madison,” Klein says. “And there's a very large housing problem.”

On SJP-Madison’s demand that UW-Madison call for a permanent ceasefire and end to the “siege on Gaza,” Klein says it is “self-explanatory.”

Klein says she and other protesters were inspired by the historic student activism seen during the anti-South African apartheid protests and Black Lives Matter protests. 

Klein says the protesters are going to “stay strong until our demands are met.” 

“There's a really strong history of students being powerful in their collective to meet demands,” Klein says. “I know that we were inspired by that and part of how we set up our camp and how we are going about dealing with the administration.”

Saba told reporters on Friday morning that the protesters are looking for their demands to be fully met, not just considered or put up to a vote.

“In order for us to take down our encampment, we want [UW-Madison] to show that they're committed to actually meeting our demands,” Saba said.